Navigating

This section describes how you can navigate through a document in Okular.

There are multiple ways of scrolling the viewing area. One is to use the Up and Down arrow keys. You may also use the scrollbar, your mousewheel or the PgUp and PgDn keys.

You can also use vim-like navigation keys, namely H to move to the top of the previous page, L to move to the top of the next page, J to move one line down, and K to move one line up.

Another way is to hold the left mouse button down at any place on the document while dragging the mouse in the opposite direction of where you want to move. This procedure only works if the Browse tool is enabled, which you can select by choosing ToolsBrowse.

Note

When viewing a document in the Presentation mode use Up and Down arrow keys to switch between pages or slides. The number and the position of the current slide will be shown in the overlay at the right upper corner of screen.

If you want to read a document with several pages use the automatic scrolling feature of Okular. Start automatic scrolling with Shift+Down or Shift+Up. Then use these keys to increase and decrease the scrolling speed. You can start or stop automatic scrolling temporarily by pressing the Shift key; pressing any other key deactivates this feature.

Another way to navigate through a document with several pages is to use the mouse pointer. Drag the page up or down, continue to drag even while reaching the bottom or top of the screen and behold. Once you cross the border of a page, the mouse cursor appears on top or bottom of the screen again and you can just continue to drag.

The sidebar on the left side of the screen enables two more ways of navigating through a document:

  • If you click on a page thumbnail the viewing area will be brought to that page.

  • If the document has a table of contents, clicking on a table of contents item will bring the document to the page linked to that item.

  • If the document has layers, you can control the layers shown by checking or unchecking the items in the Layers list.

  • If the document has bookmarks, enable the Bookmarks view and click them to go to the associated page. If bookmarks are not only shown for the current document, you can quickly switch to bookmarks in all recently opened files.

  • If the document has annotations, enable the Annotations view and click the annotations or select them with the Up and Down arrow keys and press Enter to go to the associated page.

Some documents have links. In this case you can click on them and the view will change to the page it links to. If the link is to a web page or some other document the default KDE handler for that format will be invoked. For example, clicking on a link pointing to https://www.kde.org will open the web page in the default KDE's web browser.

Important

The document internal links work only when Browse Tool is used.

Additionally, you may use the following functionality to quickly move to specific places in the document:

  • You can go to the beginning of the document using Ctrl+Home or using GoBeginning of the document.

  • You can go to the end of the document using Ctrl+End or using GoEnd of the document.

  • You can go forward in the document using Space or PgDn. To go to the next page of the document use the Next Page Toolbar button or GoNext Page in the menubar.

  • You can go back in the document using Backspace or PgUp. To go to the previous page of the document use Previous Page Toolbar button or GoPrevious Page in the menubar.

  • You can go back to the positions in the document where you came from in a chronological order. Consider e.g. reading the phrase As shown in [15], …, and you want to know quickly lookup reference [15]. So you click on it, and Okular will jump to the list of references. Using Alt+Shift+Left or GoBack in the menubar will bring you back to exactly the position where you came from.

  • You can go forward in the document after the jumping back as described above using Alt+Shift+Right or GoForward in the menubar.

  • You can go to the next match when searching using F3 or Enter (when the focus is on Find text field) keys or EditFind Next menu item or move back to the previous match using Shift+F3 or Shift+Enter (when the focus is on Find text field) keys or EditFind Previous menu item.